What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason, I have arranged each chater in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes, simply by reading the headlines which are in italics. If you read the beginning and end of every chapter, and the italic headlines that lie between them, turning the pages almost as fast as you can, you will be able to get the overall structure of the book in less than an hour.
Then if you want to go into detail, you will know where to go, but always in the context of the whole.
This in “On Reading This Book,” from Christopher Alexander prefacing The Timeless Way of Building, a book which I had, with good intentions, set out to read cover to cover. Instead I read it, this way, in one hour. An author truly writing for readers. Perhaps we need a few more italics in our design.
